Mital Makadia’s legal career began on the East Coast, with Big Law firms, but she moved into early-stage startup work with long-time Silicon Valley boutique Grellas Shah nearly a decade ago. She’ll work with companies on a range of usual startup issues, but she and the firm also focus on individual founder representation (when it…
More posts by this contributor Yesterday’s “plastics” are today’s crypto tokens We’re reaching the endgame of an inevitable showdown between big tech and regulators with a ley battleground around consumer data. In many ways, the fact that things have gotten here reflects that the market has not yet developed an alternative to the data paradigm…
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a lot of fun. Connie Lozios took the captain’s chair in San Francisco while I manned the sails, and we had Female Founders Fund’s founder Anu Duggal in the studio to round out our crew.…
There was a nice surprise morsel for those following Turtle Beach’s financials this week. In addition to a “record fourth quarter,” the headset maker announced that it has agreed to purchase fellow gaming peripheral company Roccat for $14.8 million in cash. Turtle Beach is best known for creating gaming headsets for a wide range of…
The options available to women who want to avoid getting pregnant today are bad. Most, like the widely used birth control pill, feed man-made estrogen and progestin hormones to women, which are capable of causing a number of awful side effects. YourChoice Therapeutics — a startup launched by a team of Berkeley researchers, including two…
Uber, on the heels of Lyft’s official documentation for its initial public offering, is expected to file its S-1 in April, Reuters reports. Uber, in December, filed confidential paperwork for its IPO. Uber will also reportedly kick off its IPO roadshow next month. As part of its offering, Uber is also expected to reward some…
Bay Area photography startup Polarr announced this morning that it has raised an $11.5 million Series A. The new round of funding, led by Threshold Ventures with participation from Pear Ventures and Cota Capital, brings the startup’s total funding to around $12.5 million, according to the latest Crunchbase figures. At the moment, the company is…
On-demand food delivery startup DoorDash has been under fire as of late for its practices around paying drivers. In an email to drivers today, obtained by TechCrunch, DoorDash said drivers received an average of $17.50 or more per hour on deliveries in 2018. That figure, of course, does not take into account cost of mileage,…
Ford is preparing to open an autonomous vehicle program in Austin as the automaker continues to ramp up testing ahead of launching a self-driving taxi and delivery service in 2021, according to sources familiar with the development. A new job listing for an autonomous vehicles “market specialist” based in Austin validates the information. Austin is…
Apple Music is launching on Amazon Fire TV in the U.S. today, after rolling out in December to Amazon’s Echo line of smart speakers. The news is notable as it’s yet another example of the eased tensions between the two rivals following Apple CEO Tim Cook’s 2017 announcement of Apple’s agreement with Amazon. Their deal…
